I recently did a review on an ebook from The Writer’s Manifesto.  It was an ebook about, well it was about writing ebooks.  There were a number of things that I pulled from that book and one of them was to give OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems a try.

Old dog – new tricks

Before I go any further on my rave (and yes, Virginia it IS a rave) you need to know that I have been a steadfast user of Microsoft Office type products for nearly 15 years.  I remember being all geeked out for the release of Windows 95.  Of course, that was when the computer ads all read something like “Blazing 486 processor speed!  Tons of room in this state of the art 350mb hard drive! Lightningfast 14.4k modem!”

Hehe.  Oh, my.

I’ve eschewed Word Perfect and for a long time looked down my nose at Mac-geeks.  (although now I want a Macbook so bad I can TASTE it).

I’ve always thought it’s just made no sense to go with anything other than Word for my word processing needs.  I’m familiar with it, it’s pretty much universal and with enough “ohms” while seated in a Lotus position, I can almost get past the thing putting caps on a character that I don’t want capped.

Move over, Darlin’. I’m coming to bed

I downloaded the free opensource software that is OpenOffice this last weekend.  I was a bit frightened and intimidated, but my inhibitions soon melted away.

First, the interface looks similar to Word, so I didn’t feel like I had stepped into the Lunar Command Module.  Most of the icons were in roughly the same spot and the pull down menus were intuitive.

I had to place a number of images in the document I was working and setting the page wrap was a cinch, as was adding a header and footer.  I really got the feeling the designers wanted a word processor to help the end user process words – not a word processor that thinks it knows better than I do what I’m trying to accomplish.

You can save your OpenOffice document in whatever format you choose so no worries about compatability.

Like Firefox, there’s almost as many extensions available as the amount of bonus $$ given to AIG Execs.  These extensions help you to powerfully create a word processing system that does just what you need.  Do you need all of your images to have captions in Portugeuse?  There’s an extension for that. (ok, well there’s probably an extension for that.)

I really like that it’s got a one click to .pdf feature.

I’ve only been using it for a week so I’m certain I’ll come up with other things to love, but for right now I’m enthralled.

What’s your take?

Do you currently use OpenOffice?  If so, what made you switch and what do you like the most?  If you don’t use it right now, are you willing to give it a try?